How often should you trim your hedges?

Why bother

Left alone they go leggy and bare at the bottom. A thorough-tier job. Skippable when life's busy, worth it when it isn't.

Why it's a range

Privet and laurel want three or four cuts a year. Slow conifers can go one to two.

What the job involves

1. Pick the season before you pick up the shears. Most formal hedges want two or three cuts a year, informal ones once, slow-growing evergreens as little as once every two or three years. Late winter or early spring is the safe default, before new growth starts and before the birds are nesting.
2. Cut the top narrower than the base. It feels wrong, but a wedge shape lets sunlight reach the whole face. Trim it square or top-heavy and the bottom thins out and goes bare and woody.
3. Shears or a powered hedge trimmer for the shaping. For any thick stems that have got away from you, loppers or a pruning saw. Don't fight a branch the wrong tool can't handle.
4. Pull every cutting back at least 12 inches off the siding and foundation, then rake up and haul the lot off. A damp mat of clippings against the wall is just rot waiting its turn.

Do it yourself, or pay someone?

Yourself, for most. It's shaping plus cleanup, not specialist work. Hand it to a pro for tall hedges that need a ladder, badly overgrown ones, or if you just want it gone: roughly $40 to $100 an hour, or about $25 to $60 per 10-foot length, with a typical visit landing $185 to $450. Hauling the clippings can add $25 to $100 if they bill it separately.

What skipping it costs

$650 to $5,000 is the going rate to repair wood siding, and a hedge left to grow into the wall is one of the quieter ways to get there. Pressed against the siding, it traps moisture and blocks the airflow that would dry the wall out, so the wood behind it rots, and it hands termites, ants and beetles a direct bridge onto the house. Most siding repairs sit lower in that band; the moisture-and-rot jobs, where it has reached the structural wood, run the top end, $1,500 to $5,000 and up. A trim and a rake is the cheap end of that range. (In wildfire country there's a second tail: unpruned shrubs close to the house become ladder fuel that carries fire to the wall, which is its own kind of expensive.)

Signs it's overdue

• Branches are touching or pressing into the siding, the gutters, or the window frames.
• The hedge has swallowed a path, a driveway sight line, or a street sign.
• The base is going bare and woody while the top stays bushy. That's a hedge that's been topped too wide for too long.

When to start thinking about it

A few days' warning does it. Grumpty grumbles 5 days out, then leaves you alone. Mark it done and Grumpty sets the next one, every 6 months, so you can go back to forgetting it exists.

Questions people ask